The Cannibal Spirit Read Online Free PDF Page A

but they set me in a different mood, so that, by the time I perched myselfdown at my desk in the corner of the greathouse, nearby the door with the curtain thrown back for light and a candle burning, I had to put away two sheets of paper as I sprayed the ink or lost my track of thinking. But, shortly, I got to settled. My old desk, she’s a fine item. I built her myself some years before, fine-planed a single, fat plank of aged and knotted red cedarwood to smoothness, carved old designs what I have seen from caves and rocks, primitive and ancient, about its edges.
    The bundle was by my side, wrapped secure in hide. In it was the very suit of armour what stands before me now, here in the museum. I had a letter and the story of it to finish writing for Professor Boas, to go with the bundle by post across the country and on down to New York. I sat industrious for some hours describing details—Boas do love the details—till, at last, I felt a tug at my shirt sleeve. Henry Omxid’s granddaughter, four years old, buckteeth, black eyes always filled up with surprise, was at me to come out and play. It was already past our usual time. So I stretched up my arms, and groaned some. I put the writing I had done with the letter into its envelope and sealed it. I checked that the bundle was secure under my desk. It would go on the steamer due that evening.
    Then up and out into the late-afternoon light, and we was away down to the stones on the beach, me to hurl them out beyond the tide, and her bouncing in delight or sulking when each of her own great, serious hurls fetched a pebble but an arm’s length forward, or once, glorious, into the water as it broke so gentle on the shore that afternoon.
    When she was called in for supper, I sat on a boulder, watching the weighty clouds to the north as they did gather, ready for the dark to fall so that they might roll down to fall upon us.
    Then I heard the steamer’s whistle, and Abayah’s words came floating cross the water. My old ankles twisting on the pebbles after, as I dashed for the jetty. It is terrible waiting so long the waiting turns ordinary, but then quite suddenly it’s happened. He was three years dying, my son.
    We brung David’s body to the greathouse, the people following. Francine piped up, voicing the old words a mother speaks to her dead child. “What is the reason that you have done this to me?” she says. “I have tried hard to treat you well since you came to me. What is the reason that you desertme, child? Did I treat you wrong? Maybe I did something to you in the way I treated you. I will try better if you come back to me. Please become well once more in the place you are going. And when you are well come back to me, child. Do not stay away there. Please have mercy on me, your mother.”
    She spoke them as a real mother should to a dead child. A blessing poor Lucy was not there to face that grief herself. Lucy: my first wife. Still, Francine loved David as her own, and Grace loved him as a full brother.
    But when Francine spoke, the years did fall away to nothing. I felt again my love for poor, dead Lucy as a torment almost more than I could bear. I confess I hardly was thinking about David at that moment at all. The faces of all my dead rose up before me in the firelight: my two babies what died young, my father and my mother, my brother and my sister, and all those others I have knowed; all dead of some disease or other.
    We did sit together all the night through beside my David’s body. My poor boy, what I could not save. Not him, nor any of the others I have loved. I was a man of medicine; so called, but not in fact, by all my failures what followed.
    That night beside David’s body I don’t know where my head did travel. Black places. Places populated by the spirits of my grief and of my powerlessness, fuelled as well with rage at the scheming of those against me. I did not think the day would ever come